CHAPTER VIII.
HIGH VALLEY.
Clover was putting Phil's chamber to rights, and turning it into a sitting-room for the day, which was always her first task in the morning.
They had been at St.Helen's nearly three weeks now, and the place had taken on a very homelike appearance.

All the books and the photographs were unpacked, the washstand had vanished behind a screen made of a three-leaved clothes-frame draped with chintz, while a ruffled cover of the same gay chintz, on which bunches of crimson and pink geraniums straggled over a cream-colored ground, gave to the narrow bed the air of a respectable wide sofa.
"There! those look very nice, I think," she said, giving the last touch to a bowl full of beautiful garden roses.

"How sweet they are!" "Your young man seems rather clever about roses," remarked Phil, who, boy-like, dearly loved to tease his sister.
"My young man, as you call him, has a father with a gardener," replied Clover, calmly; "no very brilliant cleverness is required for that." In a cordial, kindly place, like St.Helen's, people soon make acquaintances, and Clover and Phil felt as if they already knew half the people in the town.

Every one had come to see them and deluged them with flowers, and invitations to dine, to drive, to take tea.

Among the rest came Mr.Thurber Wade, whom Phil was pleased to call Clover's young man,--the son of a rich New York banker, whose ill-health had brought him to live in St.Helen's, and who had built a handsome house on the principal street.